Video surveillance produces a large amount of continuous video data over the course of hours, days, and even months. Such video data includes many long and uneventful portions that are of no significance or interest to a reviewer. In some existing video surveillance systems, motion detection is used to trigger alerts or video recording. However, using motion detection as the only means for selecting video segments for user review may still produce too many video segments that are of no interest to the reviewer. For example, some detected motions are generated by normal activities that routinely occur at the monitored location, and it is tedious and time consuming to manually scan through all of the normal activities recorded on video to identify a small number of activities that warrant special attention. In addition, when the sensitivity of the motion detection is set too high for the location being monitored, trivial movements (e.g., movements of tree leaves, shifting of the sunlight, etc.) can account for a large amount of video being recorded and/or reviewed. On the other hand, when the sensitivity of the motion detection is set too low for the location being monitored, the surveillance system may fail to record and present video data on some important and useful events.
It is a challenge to identify meaningful segments of the video stream and to present them to the reviewer in an efficient, intuitive, and convenient manner. Human-friendly techniques for discovering and presenting motion events of interest both in real-time or at a later time are in great need.
In some environments, the large amount of information produced by home monitoring devices is communicated to a remote server to enable long term off-site storage and sharing of the information. Because this information (such as videos produced by surveillance cameras) could involve private subscriber information, it is important that transmission of the data between the home monitoring device and remote server is secure. Similarly, it is important that the process of provisioning an electronic monitoring device (i.e., the process of associating the device with an account/user and configuring the device to communicate with a remote server—e.g., via a home wireless network connected to the Internet via a router) is secure. For example, a provisioning process for a home monitoring device should prevent unauthorized access to the home monitoring device and should also protect network security credentials (e.g., network encryption keys and passwords). In addition to being secure, a provisioning process should be user-friendly. This could be a challenge given that many home monitoring devices have constrained user interfaces. For example, a small surveillance camera is unlikely to have a display or a rich set of user interface controls that can be used in a provisioning process.
A home monitoring device can be provisioned via an application running on a second device connected to the home monitoring device, but that could expose the device to unauthorized use and/or expose network security credentials—especially if the home monitoring device and the second device are connected by an unsecure wireless link. Some risk of exposure of network credentials can be prevented by using direct wired connections between the home monitoring device and the second device and/or an Internet router during provisioning, but direct wired connections are less convenient than wireless links, and even with the use of wired connections, confidential device and network information could still be compromised if saved in the clear on the second device and/or the server. For the above reasons, it would be useful to provide methods for provisioning electronic monitoring devices that are both convenient and secure.